“That this land can grow coffee is a symbol of peace”
The line isn’t ours. HUCK Magazine wrote it about Génova, and it’s the best summary we’ve ever read of why we run this trip.
Where Génova is
South of Quindío, up in the cordillera. For more than fifty years it was a municipality nobody talked about much, and when they did, it was for the reasons you’d expect. People left. Farms sat empty. The coffee kept growing anyway, because the mountain doesn’t care about wars.
What’s happening now
Now people tell their story. That’s literally what changed: after half a century of silence, people are stepping into the light to tell it. Not our version of them — theirs, in their own words.
A major from the High Mountain Battalion said it in front of a group of visitors, and we’ve quoted him ever since because we can’t think of anything better:
“If I don’t have my hand on my rifle right now while I’m talking to you, it’s because this country is changing.”
What this trip is not
This isn’t dark tourism. You won’t be shown where things happened or handed a rundown of numbers. There are no ruins to photograph, no suffering on display.
We’re also not going to promise you’ll understand the Colombian conflict in a day — that would be arrogant, and it would be a lie. Fifty years don’t fit into one afternoon.
What will happen: you’ll listen to people from Génova tell their own story, on their own terms, unfiltered. You’ll have lunch with them. And you’ll see coffee growing where, not so long ago, nothing grew at all, because no one could climb up there to plant it.
Why this tour exists
Because peace was a huge part of why Experiencia Cafetera started. It’s not a product we bolted onto the portfolio once it became fashionable: the brand was born right as the country was beginning its own process, and this is what we were made of from day one.
Sustainable tourism can be the channel for telling how far we’ve come on something no indicator measures: self-esteem.
An honest warning
Génova hasn’t overcome the conflict. Génova is rising — in the present tense, every day, with what it has.
If you’re coming for a story with a neat, happy ending, this isn’t that trip. If you’re coming to see a country remaking itself, stumbles and all, then yes.
